A typical home cable TV topology 100 is presented in FIG. 1. In this topology 100, a Network Interface Device (NID) 102 demarcates a line between telecommunication company equipment (“Tel Co.”) and customer's equipment at the customer's premises (“CPE”), such as a home or business. The telecommunications company provides a wide-band cable TV signal to the CPE through the NID 102. In the illustrated example, the cable TV signal is distributed through a 1:4 splitter 104, over existing home wiring 106 (such as coaxial cable, a pair of twisted copper wires, power wiring, etc), though 1:2 splitters 108, 110, and out to TVs in different areas of the CPE. For remote areas with relatively long branches (e.g., TV #5), an amplifier 112 may be used to boost the signal.
Typically, cable TV signals are transmitted in a frequency band between 50 MHz and 850 MHz. Because home wiring 106 can support other frequency bands in addition to this cable TV frequency band, network engineers are developing home networks that use existing home wiring for communication between network nodes other than televisions. For example, these network nodes could include computers, digital video recorders (DVRs), digital TVs, VoIP phones, security systems, and the like; all of which could communicate over frequency bands that are non-overlapping with the cable TV frequency band (e.g., above or below the cable TV frequency band).
Unfortunately, the splitters used in existing home wiring configurations were intended for unidirectional transmission (i.e., from cable telecommunications provider to TV) and not for transmission between network nodes within a home network. Therefore, these splitters have made data transfer between network nodes within home networks extremely difficult until now.